


Home As A Romanticized Concept

by melliyna



Category: Criminal Minds, Pundit RPF (US)
Genre: Community: lgbtfest, Kid Fic, LGBT families, M/M, Queer Themes, cm: family verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-13
Updated: 2010-06-13
Packaged: 2017-10-10 02:26:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/94424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melliyna/pseuds/melliyna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for LGBT fest 2010 for the prompt 191 <i>Any fandom, any character, she/he had always thought being gay made the question of having children irrelevant but falling for someone with child(ren) makes her/him rethink their original position</i>. Title from a song by Woodpigeon with a million amounts of thanks to Bessemerprocess for the beta.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Home As A Romanticized Concept

It was a bit wrong the way it felt like a sitcom set-up. Two ex's, two pairs of egos and one DC bar. Keith could even hear himself humming the theme music as he walked in. And of course, Dave had spotted the humming. "You know, if you actually even considered watching Two and a Half Men..."

"You'll burn the evidence that's left?" He says, yes, something like that. And of course Dave does that thing he does with his eyebrows. That thing that yes, still kind of makes Keith horny for the days he could do something about it. It might have had something to do with the DC bar, the atmosphere (passing of historical legislation - it's like foreplay for policy and politics nerds) or just the fact that Dave looked damn good when he wore blue and wasn't quite off duty from being FBI. So they decide to share a drink - Dave orders a whiskey and Keith snarks him, then Keith orders a beer and Dave snarks his taste in beers. It all works like it should, for them.

And then he spots the ring and makes some crack to Dave about his lack of ability to resist the idea of having more alimony to pay.

"I'm not leaving this one."

"What the fuck did they give you, Rossi?"

"Kids. Five of them. And himself."

"Dave, you...." Keith can't make himself get the rest of the sentence out for a moment but he manages to stumble something out that might sound like congratulations which seems to encourage Dave to both talk (about Aaron, the husband) and to pull out photographs that he pushes across the bar and Keith takes in a half comprehending daze.

And he looks at the first photograph and the sentences that want to tumble out lurk at the edges of Keiths' brain and he's got no idea where to go from here. He'd known David Rossi - as much as you can ever know anyone, obviously but they'd shared five years of inhabiting the same space and bed. Five years of companionable bickering, snark, pie, baseball and seventeen different kinds of bewilderment at each others respective occupations (though maybe profiler and journalist aren't so far away) and a united fucking grump at labels (Rossi is a homosexual man who has had many serious relationships with men and has been married to three women whom he loved very much. Keith is sort of in the opposite category but mostly, he doesn't like the way labels get in the way of long and witty digressions) but 'family and kids' was never in that. Family, kids and handsome husband was were definitely not in there.

"I thought you'd sworn off marriage. Hell Dave, I thought you'd sworn off rug-rats for the term of your natural life." Keith says, half astonished.

What he doesn't say at least doesn't have to be telegraphed, because that's something that Dave is still way too good at picking up on. Because they both know it wouldn't have worked, it's just that it always felt like Dave came to terms with that way sooner than he should have done and Keith, well, Keith realises, he still hasn't. Because if it wasn't the fact that they'd default to 'room-mates' and 'oh him, he's just a friend' and he'd found himself nodding along with the fact that parenting was undesirable. Dave has apparently, moved past that one.

So he stares at the photograph again. A birthday party, in fact. There's a mass of children - one very small toddler with curly brown hair holding on to a toy dinosaur, one little girl with bright red shoes and a determined expression of delight, one slightly bigger little girl smiling in a soccer jersey, one early teen-aged boy who is happily listening to the little girl with bright red shoes and her glee and the birthday girl, who looks happy but shy. She's holding a new book with one hand and is hugging her father with the other. Her father. Dave's husband. Who is far too handsome to be human, as far as Keith can see. Maybe Dave's married to an alien. Or a Republican. Or an evil republican alien from a modelling catalogue.

"So, where did you find him?" It probably comes out harsher than he intended but Dave apparently still gets when Keith is just regular putting his foot in it and when he actually needs a metaphorical smack, because he answers easily enough.

"Well we were friends for a while Keith. And then a certain number of things went to hell very fast. But I found him." The 'it wasn't that simple" doesn't even have to be articulated so Keith signals for another refill and they break for a talk about baseball (which Rossi tolerates) and a talk about politics (which Dave has an interesting perspective on, from the position of not really giving a flying fuck about the petty details therein). But he is curious, so he eventually asks about what Aaron does for a living, gets "DOJ lawyer" and from there, he's hard pressed not to ask for a life story. He likes to know who married his friend, if nothing else. And so he gets the story (or as much of it as Dave is willing to tell) from the courtship part, to the bits where Dave is dealing with his partner being an early morning person, which cycles back to the kids.

 

"....And the kids, well, they're actually the ones planning on taking over the world. Just you wait, you'll wake up one day and Penelope Hotchner will be president."

Keith cannot help but think that Dave Rossi talking about his kids with glowing pride is a sign of the apocalypse. And that thought? It comes out harsher than he might have intended but fuck it, he has no idea. Because David Rossi is the least parental person he's ever met. Gay or straight, male or female. Rossi is not the person who he'd think would deal with patience with trying to explain to have the patience to deal with the bigots' "well who's the woman then?" or "but don't you know children aren't puppies!" or anything else likely to come out of say, Huckabees mouth any other inane thing that might come out of the mouth of someone like Glen Beck. They are both too much the same that way, all blustery egos and quick tempered tongues which might be why they both worked so well and fell apart so spectacularly.

 

"Do they have names or do you just refer to them in the collective sense?" Keith asks. He is curious, he's always curious, especially about anyone Dave loves this much. And the small children he'd never thought either of them would have. You don't think you would, not in the map of his life because that's not what he knew and however much he can see others going after it, can support them there's a pain there that makes him wonder about himself. He's happy with where he is but sometimes, yeah Keith Olbermann would like the white picket fence and the ridiculous dog. Though maybe not the ridiculous dog he thinks, dragging his attention back to Dave's answer to his question.

"Well, Spencer is the youngest one with the curls and the dinosaur toys, Penelope is the one with the red shoes who likes to think she's a mermaid, Jennifer Jane is the girl in the soccer jersey, Emily is the birthday girl and Derek is our oldest. They tend to answer to Spence, Pen, JJ, Em and Derek likes to be called by his middle name by family and friends. Also, Pen sometimes goes through a period when she likes to be people other than a mermaid.

 

He should have known that when it comes to David Rossi, he will call you on your bullshit. And then he'll let you call him on his, which is possibly why they survived five years without killing each other. And this is ground that is sounding far too familiar, especially when he considers that he's always straddled the line between desperately wanting kids and desperately not wanting kids because well, he loves his niece and nephew but handling it, handling the idea of responsibility is not what scares him. It's what comes after - the many and varied ways in which he would no doubt, screw this up. Together they would have both screwed it up in a fashion that's probably not to be contemplated.

When you get two people who can't keep their mouths shut and combine it, there's going to be an implosion. At least they came out of it as uneasy friends rather than anything else but that's the benefit of experience and hindsight of being aware enough to walk away when you could see it coming. Mostly, anyway.

But then Keith Olbermann has enough trouble sometimes, just remembering that he needs to watch how nice or not nice he is to people at work. There's an apology column burned in to his brain that reminds him of that one and how much worse can tears be if it was a kid. Especially if it was a kid he knows he'd need to bring up on national television and yet, yet here is Rossi with an FBI career, a husband, children and enough danger and Issues to poke a stick at and he's decided to do it.

There's been a pause in conversation but when Dave speaks again, Keith thinks he must have seen something else in him. Perils and fringe benefits of profiling.

"Look Olbermann, it's not easy. I would never, ever say it was. What it is is something I knew I had to do and that changes things too. When you make a decision like that, it forces you to. I made the commitment, I have to stick to it and believe me, I wasn't sure."

"You nearly didn't?"

"Keith, I nearly took one look and ran, Aaron or no Aaron. But in the end maybe I'm too damn stubborn and anyway, the DOJ has a great non-discrimination policy these days."

"What about the FBI?"

"I'm still David Rossi. I've got a certain amount of privilege by default Keith. At this point I just want it clear that my family is my family and this is how it works. We're mostly normal."

"Even the youngest who thinks she's a mermaid?"

"Oh Penelope Elanor? She's a character all in her own right."

They part with a relative degree of grumpy amiability. The next night on his show, Keith ends up making Mick Huckabee the Worst Person in the World and then goes to the bar to attempt to avoid Rachel who will want answers he can't give and Jon and Stephen, who are parents and thus are out. Because he's still not sure.


End file.
